Insanely Great

The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything

A look at Macintosh, ten years after–sort of a personal history of a computer that I consider the most important consumer product of our times, the engine that introduced digital metaphor on a massive scale. And a cute little bugger to boot.

You can read a brief excerpt that was published in Wired. Doesn’t do the whole thing justice though.

In 1995, Penguin issued a paperback edition WITH AN INDEX. Yes, those of you who bitched and whined about no index in the hardback can now be happy. And in the version after that (with a spiffy iMac on the cover) there is a chapter with exclusive stuff on how Steve Jobs came back and saved Apple. (For now.)

You can order Insanely Great directly from Amazon.com. Also available in England (Viking-Penguin), Japan, or Israel. Other books include Artificial Life, The Unicorn’s Secret, Hackers, and Crypto.

And it’s also in electronic form! For the 20th anniversary edition — not coincidentally, the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh — I have included for the first time the transcript of the remarkable interview I did with Steve Jobs when I covered the Mac launch for Rolling Stone. Here’s a New York Times story that describes it. The new edition is available now in the Kindle version of Insanely Great. Coming next is the new appendix in the iBooks, Nook, and other formats.

Some of my Iconoclast columns are available on the Macworld site (including one of my favorites, the 1994 Mosaic column). Also, I was the original official curator, CEO, and janitor for the Macintosh Game Hall of Fame, the celebrated repository for all great Mac games (located in virtual downtown Pittsfield, Mass). Check out the latest class of great games.

Apple has its own web site, where you can learn the official view of Macintosh.